Forms of vitality, mirroring and psychotherapy. Daniel Stern’s legacy

The exponential growth in neuroscience research has solicited different types of psychotherapy to extensively investigate their epistemological bases and clinical practices. Affective dynamics and clinical dialogue have been reinterpreted in the light of theories concerning the caregiver-baby dyad, strengthening the idea that what happens during therapy can be better understood through the conceptual grid of the intersubjective paradigm. The present paper promotes a new approach to relational psychotherapy that stresses the role of Forms of Vitality as global organizers of interpersonal experience and as a way of transforming implicit memories into self-reflexive representations. By connecting Stern's theoretical construct to the intersubjective paradigm, we consider Forms of Vitality to be a fecund construct in clinical settings.